The Erotics of C. P. Cavafy

Nina Dinatale
Bard College

I find Cavafy startling in his sexual candor. In particular, it is the time period he wrote in--1900 to 1930--and the subject of his candor--sexual liaisons between men. The majority of Cavafy's poems are about classical events and figures. But the minority that concern sexuality stand out for their vivid renderings of illicit settings and evocative emotions. Many of the sexuality poems take place in back rooms, as in "Chandelier"[1]: "In the small room, radiantly lit / by the chandelier's hot fire, / no ordinary light breaks out. / Not for timid bodies / The lust of this heat." Or after a character has departed from a back room, as in "In the Street": "he drifts aimlessly down the street / as though still hypnotized by the illicit pleasure, / the very illicit pleasure he's just experienced." Beds hold furtive secrets, as in "Their Beginning": "They get up and dress quickly, without a word. / . . . it seems they sense that something about them betrays / what kind of bed they've just been lying on." Or the action takes place in a café, in a heat thick with alcohol. While Cavafy continuously uses terms such a "shameful" and "illicit," his poetic style confers the same dignity, the same stately tone to his sexuality poems as it does to those that concern historical/classical themes (although I do no mean to imply, by making this distinction, that sexuality is neither historical nor a subject of classical attention).

Cavafy's sexuality poems vary from those with explicitly rendered themes to those cloaked in metaphor. I find the explicit ones fascinating for their simple, plainly drawn depictions of anonymous affairs or sudden longings. Although the language of the poems is blunt, the overall affect is always one of understated, quiet desire, as in "The Next Table": "There, now that he's sitting down at the next table, / I recognize every motion he makes ­ and under his clothes / I see again the limbs that I loved, naked." "Passing Through" is another example: "his blood--fresh and hot-- / offers itself to leisure. His body is overcome / by forbidden erotic ecstasy; and his young limbs / give in to it completely." The spare, elegant figuring of these poems showcases their erotic subject, but the erotic subject functions to convey an emotional message as well as a sensual one. Cavafy was a master at depicting the despair of the abandoned lover, of the liaison desired and yet not wholly fulfilling. He accomplished this by leaving out elements of the stories he told, rather than be including them. Where other poets would attempt to convey despair by way of baroque variations on the catalogue of emotions, Cavafy simply leaves out the elements that signify emotional satisfaction. In this way the reader is made to feel absence or alienation, and in "Long Ago": "A skin as though of jasmine . . . / that August evening -- was it August evening -- was it August? -- / I can still just recall the eyes: blue, I think they were . . . / Ah, yes, blue: a sapphire blue."

But while Cavafy's explicit poems are alluring, his sexuality poems that are cloaked in metaphor contain the more interesting academic question. Three such poems in particular, "The Bandaged Shoulder," "He Asked About the Quality," and "Days of 1909, '10, '11" give me the same impression: that the sexual message in these poems is conveyed through a method very similar to fetishism.

"Days of 1909, '10, '11" tells the story of the "son of a misused, poverty-stricken sailor" who "worked for an ironmonger." The description of the young man is the entire first stanza, which is unmitigated in its drabness: "his clothes shabby, / his work shoes miserably torn, / his hands filthy with rust and oil." In the third stanza Cavafy describes him as "exquisite, more perfect" and laments that no statue or painting was made for us remember him by, for the boy was "overworked, harassed, given to cheap debauchery, / he was soon used up." The "cheap debauchery" is the subject for the middle stanza. Cavafy writes that the boy would "sell his body for a half-crown or two" in order to buy a tie or an expensive shirt. The fetishism in the poem lies in Cavafy's linkage of the prostitution to the item of clothing. I do not mean to suggest that the character engages in prostitution because he finds the items of clothing he longs for erotic: I believe that Cavafy is using the items of clothing to suggest a certain "easiness" on the part of the main character that we are told about, but goes otherwise undescribed. Cavafy says the character is cheap, but his description of the boy's selling himself is limited to the equation of the sex act to the tie and the shirt. Significant in their absence are the traditional literary justifications that accompany discussions of prostitution: descriptions of extreme poverty, or abandonment, a broken home, or lack of religion. Cavafy's method for convening both the alienation in the boy's life and the sexual looseness he exhibited is the unembellished equation of his sexual acts to "a more or less expensive tie, / . . . a beautiful blue shirt in some store window."

There is a similar kind of fetishism in "He Asked About the Quality." In this poem Cavafy describes a young man who leaves his trivial job at the end of the day. He is about 29 years old, "Good-looking; / and interesting: showing as he did that he's reached / his full sensual capacity." As he passes by a shop that sells "cheap and flimsy merchandise for workers he sees someone inside the shop and feels compelled to go inside. He makes up the excuse that he wishes to look at some handkerchiefs. The young man's desire is met by a similar longing in the man he was attracted to behind the shop counter. But neither has mentioned sex. The message is conveyed through the intermediate object of the handkerchiefs: "he asked about the quality of the handkerchiefs / and how much they cost, his voice choking, / almost silenced by desire. / And the answers came back in the same mood, / offering hidden consent." But the covertness of their longing seems to be a component of its eroticism. After another stanza describing the desire invested in the merchandise: "They kept on talking about the merchandise -- / but the only purpose: that their hands might touch / over the handkerchiefs, that their faces, their lips, / might move close together as though by change -- / a moment's meeting of limb against limb." Cavafy finishes these two lines: "Quickly, secretly, so the shopowner sitting at the back / wouldn't realize what was going on." These lines indicate the hidden nature of the transaction, but also the erotic component of covertness. Of course custom and prejudice dictated that such affairs remain unseen. But in that Cavafy chose to end the poem with those lines, I believe it also indicates his awareness of the way in which he was conveying a sense of eroticism. He did not need to cloak the sexual feelings in the poem in the figure of the handkerchiefs. He is quite frank elsewhere. Cavafy seems to have substituted scarves for sexual language, covertness for openness, to enhance the erotic texture of the poem.

The fetishism of "The Bandaged Shoulder" is more pronounced. The poem tells the story of an occasion where Cavafy had the opportunity to re-bandage the injured shoulder of his lover. The first two stanzas explain how the shoulder may have been injured, and how the lover accidentally re-opened the wound. The first sexual references do not appear until the last two lines of the third stanza, where Cavafy writes, "I liked looking at the blood. / It was a thing of my love, that blood." In the fourth and final stanza, Cavafy finds, after the lover has left, a bit of bloody rag on the floor from the shoulder's old dressing. And only in the last three lines of the stanza is desire clearly evoked: Cavafy provocatively ends "I put it to my lips / and kept it there a long while ­ the blood of my love against my lips."

The mood of the poem is one of wrenching desire and sensualism. But the poem contains no explicitly sexual references. The mood is conveyed mainly through the figure of the bloody rag; the sexual meaning accumulates on an object, the forgotten piece of bandage. Cavafy, as a character in the poem, eroticizes the bandage and the process of binding the shoulder: he takes his time over the dressing, he likes looking at the blood. Or rather, we feel that he finds these things sensual, even though he never explicitly makes that connection. The final stanza is very sexual, and is filled with longing, but these ideas are conveyed not through Cavafy's, the author's, usual direct manner, but by the metaphoric substitution of the bloody rag. The fetishism if two-fold: as a character Cavafy sexualizes the bloody rag, and as author Cavafy substitutes the figure of the rag for explicitly sexual references. Both substitutions, both fetishisms, successfully impart a rich sensuality.

The traditional definition of a fetish holds that it is an object that a person substitutes for a desired sexual organ or act, when that organ or act is too anxiety-provoking to mention. I am using a looser definition, for I hardly think Cavafy was fearful of sexual candor. Cavafy fetishizes the ties, the handkerchiefs, and the bandage because to do so adds greater meaning to his poems. The traditional definition of the fetish also holds that it is a perversion: in the works of Cavafy, fetishism is a means to a greater sensual texture, a more vivid rendering of desire. Cavafy did not seem to feel a need to hide the sexual subjects of many of his poems, and to his credit, when he chose to keep them covert, he achieved equally sensual moods and images.

[1] The subsequent quotations from "Chandelier" and other poems derive from the translations of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrasd in C. P. Cavafy Selected Poems, ed. George Savidis (Princeton, 1975).